Frank Bohn (socialist)
[6][7] This three-day conclave thrashed out their disagreements and issued a set of 11 principles and an Industrial Union Manifesto.
It issued a call for a convention to be held in Chicago on June 27, 1905, to launch the new general industrial organization.
[10] Bohn broke with the SLP decisively in June 1908, however, publishing an article in the non-party press lamenting the lack of unity of the American socialist movement caused by the position of his former party.
It was supposed by certain of its leaders to have attained what the Salvation Army calls 'Holiness'; therefore it durst not hold conversation with the unclean; therefore it refused to so far trust the working class' mind as to risk its fundamentally correct principles in the rough and tumble of a united movement.
Men and women who will develop into revolutionists worthwhile to the movement are sure to demand respect and decent treatment from their teachers while they are learning.
"[11]Upon departing the SLP, Bohn enlisted himself in the ranks of the rival Socialist Party of America, a group which he acknowledged "is not what we might desire."
Nevertheless: It would have been all that the clearest and most ardent revolutionist might have hoped for, had the whole revolutionary element united to form it in 1901 and learned to use decent and educational methods in propagating their correct principles.
[12]During the 1909/10 academic year Bohn was a lecturer in history, economics, and politics at Columbia University and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Vincent St. John noted in a letter to Paul Brissenden that the organization had issued 60,000 dues books in the previous 18-month period, but only about one in ten, or roughly 6,000 of these, remained members in good standing.
Bohn contributed an article to the July 1911 issue of Charles H. Kerr's International Socialist Review entitled "Is the IWW to Grow?"
The experience of the five years just past has proven conclusively that the best way for the members of the Socialist Party to develop anti-politics in the IWW is to attack it.
After keeping his criticism within party ranks for half a year, in the fall of 1917 Bohn decided to break decisively with the SPA, writing an open letter to the Secretary of Local Bronx, his own chapter.
It was my hope that the party might not make the war a primary issue here or throughout the nation; in that case I might have honorably retained my membership.
[21] Thereafter Bohn went to work for the Committee on Public Information in France and Switzerland, aiding in the production of pro-war propaganda targeted to the labor movement.
He also headed an organization called the German–American Congress for Democracy during the early years of World War II.
[24] Varian Fry writes in "Surrender on Demand" that Bohn helped him in Marseilles to aid refugees from Germany make it to America in 1940.
He is best remembered today as co-author with Big Bill Haywood of the influential pamphlet Industrial Socialism, a short work which helped fuel the American syndicalist boom of 1912–14.
